Mixed Race Studies

Social Status, Race, and the Timing of Marriage in Cuba’s First Constitutional Era, 1902-1940

Journal of Family History
Volume 36, Number 1 (December 2010)
pages 52-71
DOI: 10.1177/0363199010389546

Enid Lynette Logan, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of Minnesota, Minneapolis

This article examines the practice of marriage among whites, mestizos, blacks, Cubans, and Spaniards during the first constitutional era, focusing upon the reported ages of brides and grooms. The study consists of a quantitative examination of trends found in the records of 900 Catholic marriages celebrated in Havana during the opening decades of independence. The first major finding of the research is that according to most major indicators of status, age was negatively correlated with rank. Thus, contrary to the conclusions of studies conducted in many other contexts, those in the highest strata of society married younger. Furthermore, very significant differences were detected in the marital patterns of those identified as mixed-race and those labeled as black. This finding offers empirical weight to the notion that the early-mid twentieth-century Cuban racial structure would best be characterized as tripartite, rather than binary in nature.

Read or purchase the article here.

Half-Caste [Book Review]

The Eugenics Review
Volume 29, Number 2 (July 1937)
pages 141-142

Reviewed by Michael Fielding

Dover, Cedric. Half-Caste. London, 1937. Secker & Warburg. Pp. 324. Price 1os. 6d.

This book is dedicated to a member of the Council of the Eugenics Society. So if we are a bad lot, as bad as the author in his handpicked quotations from very back numbers of the review implies, there is at least one righteous person among us. It would be interesting to know why Mr. Dover, who carefully tells us that he completed this work in October 1936, and who has been in fairly close contact with the work and personalities of this Society, did not think it was anywhere worth mentioning that earlier in that year the Eugenics Society elected a Darwin Research student for the express purpose of studying the problems of race mixture; which is not a very sensible way of spending its money if the subject is one about which it has made up its mind. In the only reference that we can find to the Society’s present views on ethnic-crossing Mr. Dover tempers his disapproval, but so grudgingly and ungenerously as to give further point to his attack. The fact is that against eugenics Mr. Dover has much the same kind of prejudices that many persons have against the products of race-mixture. We believe that both he and they are mistaken. Mr. Dover would correct his errors by reading the Eugenics Review; they by reading his admirably written Half-Caste…

His theme, summarized in a short sentence, is that there is no genuine scientific case against miscegenation. What often masquerades as such, and is presented as a case based upon the objective study of genetical and anthropological data, proves on Mr. Dover’s examination to be no more than a rationalization of colour prejudices, imperialism, and xenophobia. “To-day there are no half-castes because there are no fullcastes.”

“Accepting the validity of the racial view,” he writes, “it becomes clear that the attributes and status of marginal communities are essentially functions of their physical and social environment, and not of Divine displeasure or some mysterious incompatibility of ‘blood,’ a fluid which has nothing to do with informed social discussion. Certainly, there are disharmonic and socially maladjusted individuals in such communities. Perhaps, too, their incidence is higher than it is among more integrated groups, though that remains to be proved, but they are susceptible to the same methods of improvement that are applied to ‘pure’ peoples. I subscribe without qualification to the prevention of undeniably dysgenic matings, whether exogamous or endogamous, but not to the conceit that colour and economic success are indices of desirability.”…

Read the entire review here.

[Note from Steven F. Riley:  For more information about Cedric Dover, read Lucy Bland’s “British Eugenics and ‘Race Crossing’: a Study of an Interwar Investigation.”]

Bob Marley ‘blacked up’ to blend in

The Independent
2010-12-04

Rob Sharp, Arts Correspondent

Reggae superstar Bob Marley suffered due to his mixed-race background

Bob Marley preached inner peace and serenity to the masses, but was so racked by angst over his race that he used shoe polish to blacken his hair, according to a new book.

Such insecurities, during Marley’s teenage years in Kingston, Jamaica, contrast strongly with the reggae superstar’s image around the world.

…Marley’s widow, Rita, is quoted in the book—entitled I and I: The Natural Mystics: Marley, Tosh and Wailer—as saying that her husband was so racially sensitised and aware of bullying for having a fairer complexion that he asked her to “rub shoe polish in his hair to make it more black; make it more African.”

The author, Colin Grant, has interviewed members of Marley’s inner circle for the book, released in January [2011]. These include Marley’s late mother Cedella Booker and Chris Blackwell, founder of Island Records.

Grant explained: “When Marley moved to Trench Town in Kingston aged 13 he was thought of as a white man and would have got a lot of grief for that.”…

Read the entire article here.

The Mulatto Millennium: Rethinking blackness in a multiracial world

Utne Reader
September/October 1998

Danzy Senna, from the book Half and Half

Strange to wake up and realize you’re in style. That’s what happened to me just the other morning. It was the first day of the new millennium, and I woke to find that mulattos had taken over. They were everywhere. Playing golf, running the airwaves, opening restaurants, modeling clothes, starring in musicals with names like Show Me the Miscegenation! The radio played a steady stream of Lenny Kravitz, Sade, and Mariah Carey. I thought I’d died and gone to Berkeley. But then I realized that, according to the racial zodiac, 2000 is the official Year of the Mulatto. Pure breeds (at least black ones) are out; hybridity is in. America loves us in all of our half-caste glory. The president announced on Friday that beige will be the official color of the millennium.

Before all of this radical ambiguity, I considered myself a black girl. Not your ordinary black girl, if such a thing exists. But rather, a black girl with a WASP mother and black-Mexican father, and a face that harks back to Andalusia, not Africa. I was born in 1970, when black described a people bonded not by shared complexion or hair texture but by shared history.

Not only was I black, but I sneered at those by-products of miscegenation who chose to identify as mixed, not black. I thought it wishy-washy, an act of flagrant assimilation, treason-passing, even. I was an enemy of the mulatto people…

…Let it be clear—my parents’ decision to raise us as black wasn’t based on any one-drop-of-blood rule from the days of slavery, and it certainly wasn’t based on our appearance, that crude reasoning many black-identified mixed people use: If the world sees me as black, I must be black. If it had been based on appearance, my sister would have been black and my brother Mexican, and I Jewish. Instead, my parents’ decision arose out of the black power movement, which made identifying as black not a pseudoscientific rule but a conscious choice. Now that we don’t have to anymore, we choose to. Because black is beautiful. Because black is not a burden, but a privilege…

…These days, M.N. folks in Washington have their own census category—multiracial—but the extremist wing of the Mulatto Nation finds it inadequate. They want to take things a step further. I guess they have a point. Why lump us all together? Eskimos have 40 different words for snow. In South Africa, during apartheid, they had 14 different types of coloreds. But we’ve decided on one word, multiracial, to describe a whole nation of diverse people who have absolutely no relation, cultural or otherwise, to one another. In light of this deficiency, I propose the following coinages:

Standard Mulatto: White mother, black father. Half-nappy hair, skin described as “pasty yellow” in winter but turns caramel tan in summer. Germanic-Afro features. Often raised in isolation from others of its kind. Does not discover “black identity” till college, when there is usually some change in hair, clothing, or speech, so that the parents don’t recognize the child who arrives home for Christmas vacation (“Honey, there’s a black kid at the door”).

African American: The most common form of mulatto in North America, this breed, seldom described as mixed, is a combination of African, European, and Native American. May come in any skin tone, from any cultural background. Often believe themselves to be “pure” due to historical distance from the original mixture, which was most often achieved through rape.

Jewlatto: The second most prevalent form, this breed is made in the commingling of Jews and blacks who met when they were registering voters down South during Freedom Summer or at a CORE meeting. Jewlattos often, though not necessarily, have a white father and black mother (as opposed to the more common black father and white mother). They are likely to be raised in a diverse setting (New York City, Berkeley), around others of their kind. Jewlattos are most easily spotted amid the flora and fauna of Brown University. Famous Jewlattos include Lenny Kravitz and Lisa Bonet (and we can’t forget Zoe, their love child)…

Read the entire article (including more about the following terms: Mestizo, Cultural Mulatto, Blulatto, Cablinasian, Tomatto, Fauxlatt0)  here.